06 May 2024 Nuns complete mission, return to Houston after 13 years

Posted at 6:54 PMh in News by

Three Catholic nuns with the Carmelite Sisters of St. Teresa were honored by members of St. Joseph Church in Conway at a farewell reception held for them on April 21. Sisters Aquilina Cari, Francisca Nava and Vidalina Barajas will return to their Mother House in Houston, Texas, later this month after concluding a mission that began 13 years ago. 

Sister Francisca (from left), Sister Aquilina and Sister Vidalina.

They, and the Carmelites who preceded them, helped develop leadership training programs for the more than 200 Hispanic parishioners from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Columbia, Panama and Peru. Their work will continue under the guidance of Deacon Ramon Argueta who’ll be serving as the church’s Hispanic Ministry Director.

Sister Aquilina, who is Peruvian, was dressed in a traditional costume and entertained the crowd with a dance from Peru.

St. Joseph’s history is rooted in religious orders like the Carmelites. When the church was founded in 1879 by the Holy Ghost Fathers, they brought in the Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny to teach school. They were followed in 1898 by the School Sisters of Notre Dame. Benedictine nuns from the St. Scholastica Convent in Fort Smith came to Conway in the late 1940s to teach at the Church of the Good Shepherd School. They had served the African American community during the segregation era. Finally, the Sisters of St. Joseph du Puy arrived in 1970 to take over high school classes while the School Sisters remained in the lower grades. By 1980, both their ranks had dwindled to the point where they had to turn over the teaching reins to a lay faculty.